Tuesday, July 15, 2008

How to save money by using your credit card

I know that really you should steer clear from owning a credit card at all but I have made a educated decision to keep one – not for “emergencies” or because I “earn” points. These were my previous justifications, hell it only took spending $3900 to get a ‘free’ $25 gift voucher at my favourite department store.

I have recently cut up one credit card and I am keeping the other one to save me money! I have worked out that by doing all of our grocery shopping online I will be able to save quite a lot of money. Now of course, this will only work if you are as useless as I am when it comes to grocery shopping sensibly.

The thing is, the second I step foot in a grocery store I spend $50. I will run in to buy milk and bananas and poof! $50 is gone. I don’t know how this happens. Seriously, I honestly can’t work it out. Now, when I do the weekly or fortnightly ‘big’ shop I will spend anywhere between $250 and $350. This is for only two people. Admittedly, I like to buy nice food. I try to buy organic though sometimes I baulk at the price of organic meat. I tend to buy branded cleaning products too. I don’t really buy snack foods just basics like rice and pasta, fresh fruit and veg, cheese, yoghurt and milk. Add in the odd spice or two and maybe some orange juice. There will of course usually be a block of chocolate in there too. If my husband comes there will be corn chips, salsa, pretzels, cashews, flavoured water and some sort of mystery fruit he has never seen before and just has to have. If I am in a good mood the odd dog treat will be thrown in as well.

I will have all this and still throughout the week I will discover that there is something essential missing. I will run up to the local (and expensive) supermarket and poof! goes my $50. Meanwhile, vegetables will languish in the crisper unused until I remember them and, discovering they have gone limp or worse, mouldy, I throw them out. There goes my $4 organic corn.

So I am switching to online grocery shopping. Not only do I plan on saving money, I plan on saving time too. Here’s the plan…

1. Cut the crap
I am going to go through my cupboards. I am going to take out any of those stir-fry marinade sachets I had forgot were there. I am going to take out that packet of chickpeas I thought I would one day have the foresight to soak overnight so they would be ready to use the next day. I am going to take out all those things that aren’t regularly used basics (flour, yeast, pasta, rice, canned tomatoes, tomato paste, soy sauce etc) and I’m going to use them. My cupboards will now be filled only with the above-mentioned basics.

2. Stocktake
I am going to write down everything I use regularly. I am going to be particularly nerdy and print this list and keep it somewhere in the kitchen. When I run out something I will mark the list. This won’t just be for food. It will be for toiletries (shampoo, soap, toothpaste etc) and cleaning goods (dish washing, clothes washing and surface cleaning). I am also going to take note of the non-basics we use regularly. These are things we probably won’t have to buy every shop, one because you can stock up when they’re on sale as they don’t go bad and two, because we just don’t thought them as fast as we go through other foods.

3. Create an everyday list
I know that everyday we both like to have a banana and two other pieces of fruit. I know that every week we go through about 2 litres of skim milk, two litres of soy milk and 6 tubs of yoghurt. We have a loaf of bread every fortnight or so.

4. Plan menus
I’m not going to be too pedantic with this. We won’t stick to it. We will go visit my parents and stay for dinner. We will get invited over to a friend’s house or on a Saturday night we will just feel like going out for dinner ourselves. But I do want to know that if I buy groceries I at least have the ingredients for 10 meals (I plan to do the shopping once a fortnight and we often just eat leftovers). So if I were to write spaghetti Bolognese I would know that I have pasta and canned tomatoes in the cupboard. I would just need to write mince, carrots, onion and side salad. Now if I’m getting onions, carrots and some salad I might as well make some other meals that week that need those things.

5. Go shopping
So then I go online. And this is the best part. I tried it the other weekend and it literally took me 20 minutes to get all my shopping done. Normally I wouldn’t have even parked the car yet 20 minutes after leaving the house for a shopping trip. I have my list in front of me and I can go methodically through, typing each item into the search bar and then picking which is the cheapest or my preferred brand (the unit pricing is particularly helpful).

Online shopping costs me $9.95 in delivery fees but the savings are well worth it. I figure that I save in numerous ways including:
- There are no petrol or parking fees
- I don’t enter a shopping centre so there’s no temptation to also stop in at the shoe store or grab a takeaway coffee
- I don’t wander aisles being tempted by sale merchandise or impulse buys
- I can look at all options for a particular food and work out which is the cheapest easily
- If I’m not sure if I’m out of something I can just walk to the cupboard (or look at my inventory) and check rather buying something I already have plenty of and letting it go to waste
- Since all meals are planned nothing goes to waste (well, that’s the plan anyway)
- I also save a few hours of my time and, if you have ever been to my shopping centre on a weekend you will know, I am also saving my sanity

Who knew a credit card could be so good for your health?

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